FT on the great speculative era: “And then there are cryptocurrencies. Fifty years ago, US president Richard Nixon severed the last link between the dollar and gold. For a while, inflation surged just as gold bugs predicted. But central banks got on top of the inflation problem and people came to accept that paper money was fine, when it was backed by a government that could insist that debts and taxes were settled in its domestic currency. Many cryptocurrencies have no asset backing, nor do they have a tax-raising state behind them. Their supposed value comes from their scarcity, yet almost 6,000 have been created. This makes nonsense of the claim that they provide a hedge against the money-creating tendencies of central banks. And their volatility makes them neither a reliable store of value nor a suitable means of exchange.”
A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps: “Sixteen years after the launch of Google Talk, Google messaging is still a mess.”
Tom Palmer: “One way of understanding the history of modern civilization is as a constant struggle between liberty and power.” [via CafeHayek]
